Friday, April 3, 2009

The intelligent computer system called — appropriately enough — Adam discovered on its own “simple but new” scientific knowledge about the genomics of the baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which scientists study as a model for more complex life forms. Adam’s developers used separate experiments to confirm the robot scientist’s hypotheses were both novel and correct.

“Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail,” said Ross King, who led the research at Aberystwyth University. “This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for Robot Scientists.” …